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Ann Copeland's Season of Apples
Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q4 1996)
Ann DuCille's Skin Trade
Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q4 1996) NF
Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q4 1996)
Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q4 1996)
Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q4 1996)
Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q4 1996)
Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q4 1996)
Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q4 1996)
Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q4 1996)
Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q4 1996)
A Personal Introduction to Thirty-Five Important Writers
Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q4 1996) NF
Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q4 1996) NF
Reviewed by Karen Sloan (Q4 1996)
Reviewed by Karen Sloan (Q4 1996)
Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q4 1996)
Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q4 1996)
Reviewed by Carol McPhee (Q4 1996)
Sharon Olds' The Wellspring
Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q4 1996) P
Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q4 1996)
Reviewed by Lee Anne Phillips (Q4 1996)
Reviewed by Lee Lawton (Q4 1996)
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You can find the books reviewed here at one of the many women's bookstores listed in the Feminist Bookstore Index. The links indicated here point to text-only versions of the index for the convenience of women with slow modem connections but a prettier Netscape-enhanced version is just a hotlink away.
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A mystery steeped in the atmosphere and folklore of the Appalachians (that's ap-pa-LATCH-an to you!). The author's love of the area shines through, and it is almost as if the mystery were her excuse to write about this place. You can practically smell the hickory smoke as you read about the characters, who are gradually pulled together to fulfill their fates.
McCrumb does a good job with the various threads of this mystery. At the beginning, you have no idea how these seemingly unrelated people will ever have anything to do with each other, but their meetings are credible, and all the threads completely woven before the story is done. She builds suspense gradually, with long, leisurely introductions; then shorter and shorter visits to each of them while they approach resolution.
I'll give this mystery a B, and be on the look-out for more of McCrumb's books.
Copyright © 1996 Lee Lawton
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
These two novels tell of rural and semi-rural "ordinary" families dealing with the unimaginable. Hamilton's novel is so much like Jane Smiley's Barn Blind, that I bet I'll confuse them eventually, even though the stories are different. Hamilton's writing is quirky, poetic and wise. Brown's story is less descriptive but more analytical. Both authors write from the perspective of various characters in turn. Hamilton writes as Alice, the quirky wife of Howard, a seemingly unimaginative, straight-as-an-arrow farmer. She is so true to Alice here, that it seems that Alice is Jane Hamilton. Howard's voice is dry, a little empty, not quite as full and rich a character as Alice.
Brown writes from the point of view of both Carolyn and Ben Reiser, as well as their daughter Judith. These voices are complete, and fully portrayed. Carolyn, the matter-of-fact pediatrician in a small town; Ben, the emotional artist; and Judith, the child who is growing up way too fast thanks to her older brother whose temper betrays him.
In each novel, a normal day and normal lives are thrown into total disarray by a mistake, an accident, something that could easily happen to any of us. And the changes that occur are irrevocable, and wholly believable. These people are our next-door neighbors, our siblings, and we are helpless to interfere in their fates.
In Jane Smiley's novel, Barn Blind, the tragedy occurs near the end of the novel, although the true tragedy lies in the lives of the characters she portrays. In these two novels, the tragedy occurs much earlier, and we live it with these families, and see where fate prods and pokes and changes them forever.
A Map of the World and Before and After are two painful and excellent novels by two very fine writers. They both deserve an A.
Copyright © 1996 Lee Lawton
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
This is the first of Susan Stinson's books; the second was Martha Moody. Both feature similar laconic, fat characters who are completely irresistable. In Fat Girl, 17-year-old Char falls in lust with her best friend Felice, and during a summer of self-discovery and partings, Char starts to find out who she is. Between driving around in Char's Pinto, singing at the top of their lungs, Char and Felice tentatively explore the possibilities of a lesbian relationship. Meanwhile, Felice leaves town to work in geology, her consuming interest, while Char gets a job in a nursing home, and misses Felice fiercely. They come together during a camping trip in the mountains, and at the same time Stinson introduces another subplot which is never fully developed, and subsequently fails.
This is another sweet story by Susan Stinson, a coming-of-age and coming-out story which manages to stay fresh throughout. Keep 'em comin', Susan!
Copyright © 1996 Lee Lawton
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
Here we have Ann, and Ann's best friend Ruth, who is dying in her forties of breast cancer, and Ruth's friends, who have gathered together in love and support. One of Ruth's friends is even a lesbian. Here we have a *woman's* book, full of great food, silly men, understanding children, laughter, tears, gracious dying, and undying friendship. Ruth's friends are perfect, loyal, available--the kind of friends you'd trade your family for.
And yet.....while I read this book, all I could think of was Erich Segal's Love Story, surely the most trite book about dying young ever to besmirch the shelves of libraries everywhere. I have no doubt that this will not be a popular opinion, so just ignore me and read the book, unless, of course, just a wee bit of cynicism runs through your veins. Then, you may wish for something a little more *real*, something that does not so closely approach the trite. Come on Elizabeth, dying just ain't this pretty.
Copyright © 1996 Lee Lawton
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
Sharon Olds has done it again. This isn't poetry--this is ripping the lid off life and staring headlong and unblinking at it. Never have I read anyone who lives life like this, and notices everything. Without cynicism, without a condom, without a flak jacket.
Sharon Olds refuses to talk about her family in interviews. Why should she? It's all here, from before her birth: her conception (yes -- her own conception), to high school dating, to college sit-ins, to cupping her husband's butt, to giving birth, and caring for babies, to middle-aged love and sex.
If anything, Olds is getting to be more herself as I read her. Each book is more somehow. Definitely not for the faint of heart. Poems as full of life as life can be. I highly recommend this excellent poet.
Copyright © 1996 Lee Lawton
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
Another of Anne Tyler's beautifully written books. Reading Anne Tyler is akin to sinking chin-high into a warm, scented bath, leaning back, and just letting your body float in luxury. Except.....this bath was more like sinking into a pillow of warm air. The writing is lovely, but where's the plot? A couple of weeks later, and I can't tell you what this book was about. Even as I finished the last page, I said, "Huh?", and was ready to read another book.
In Ladder, Tyler gives us Delia Grinstead, a forty-something yuppie with the requisite family values, who literally walks away from her family and home one day and doesn't come back. Like one of those dreams where everything moves silently and more slowly than life, Delia's family sort of looks for her, but can't quite remember her well enough to give an accurate description to the newspaper. No wonder: Delia moves wraith-like through the pages of this book, not quite substantial enough to make a lasting impression.
So, don't worry about my giving away the ending in this review -- I can't remember it!
Copyright © 1996 Lee Lawton
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
The description on the flyleaf begins, "It is common knowledge that the discovery of oil in Oklahoma in the 1920s made many American Indians fabulously--and newly--rich." Common knowledge or not, I have been completely ignorant of this piece of American history. And while it might seem only fair that the Native Americans should benefit from a discovery of a valuable natural resource on "useless" land set aside for them by the American government, the next step is obvious to anyone with even a passing knowledge of American history: white men try to get this valuable asset away from the Native Americans, using whatever methods that work.
This is a good and frustrating book. Well-written, characters nicely developed, strong plot, valuable information presented in an interesting way. Frustrating because the people we are led to care about just can't seem to win. I used to love books about people fighting the odds, and now that I've read _Mean Spirit_, I realize that I haven't read such a book in a long time. And like most "dark horse" books, people who fight the odds don't get to win very often. But they do reveal admirable character traits, and exhibit heroic actions that we can admire and incorporate into our own struggles with living lives of integrity and value.
It seems that all the really good novels have a backbone of heroic symbolism in them; a timeless structure which transports us to what is basic in being human, regardless of race, gender, history, or any other of humanity's trappings. This book is no exception. It is not a "great" novel, but it is a good one.
Copyright © 1996 Lee Lawton
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
Just so you know exactly where I'm coming from--I'm a Jane Smiley fan. I loved A Thousand Acres; I was ravished by Barn Blind. She is one of my favorite authors. That said, I now must say that Jane has underdone herself with Moo. This novel, set in a midwestern university, is an insider's satire, which might provide immense enjoyment or extreme discomfort to the people who provided the characterizations, but which provided me with only a passing (and mild) entertainment.
Moo might, just might, be worth reading, though, for the characters of Earl Butz, a mighty big pig, and Mrs. Walker, a lesbian dynamo who runs the entire university. Wonderful characters!
Certainly not one of Jane Smiley's best, but a few little gems kept me reading to the end.
Copyright © 1996 Lee Lawton
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
After reading this novel, I went back to read the flyleaf, and much to my amazement found a blurb by Ursula LeGuin. Who doesn't seem like the kind of person who'd be reading this book, either. Part adventure novel, and part romance, this book is definitely not what I usually read. Which is exactly why I decided to read it. Variety being the spice of life, and all that.
Here we have Tay McElroy, a thirtyish secretary who takes a job in Alaska, which is not available when she gets there, so she takes the job that is available, which is out in the "field", which in Alaska practically means an ice field, and she joins some researchers counting birds and has a couple of flings with a couple of them, and gets to be really good friends with one of the women, and thinks about being a lesbian, and sees some really cool Alaska stuff, and does some work that is really disgusting, and almost dies out there, and gets pregnant with one of the researchers, and thinks she'll probably change her whole life when she gets home, since silk blouses don't mean very much when you're about to die of hypothermia.
Yup, that's really the story, and I'm not telling you the ending! But, no matter how trite I've made it sound, it really is not badly written, and the pace of the book makes it a fairly good beach read.
Happy reading!
Copyright © 1996 Lee Lawton
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
At Paradise Gate is one of Jane Smiley's earliest novels. I believe that only Barn Blind predates this one. Although Smiley did not become well known to the reading public until the publication of A Thousand Acres, she was writing powerful books for more than a decade prior to that. One True Thing is Anna Quindlen's second foray into fiction; her name being familiar for her New York Times syndicated columns.
Both of these novels have as their themes the dying and eventual death of a family member, who is cared for at home by one of the family. In Paradise, Anna Robison cares for her seventy-seven year old husband, Ike, who can no longer get out of bed without assistance. In One, twenty-four year old Ellen Gulden is tapped by her father to care for her mother, who has been diagnosed with cancer. In each novel, family relationships are explored, and the fine line between obligation and resentment, love and guilt is strikingly portrayed.
Anna Quindlen's Ellen is chosen by her remote and cerebral father to care for her Martha Stewart-like mother, who is rapidly dying of cancer. Ellen is on a career path in journalism, after graduating from Harvard, and to please her father, whom she emulates, she quits her New York job to return to the small university town where she and her two brothers grew up, and where her father teaches and commits adultery at the local college. Why Ellen is chosen to do this job, rather than her younger, mama's boy, brother, who is just beginning college, seems puzzling to me. This family does not seem to be so much into traditional roles, and yet it is Ellen, who strongly dis-identifies with her mother, who learns to bake, plan dinner parties, make Christmas-tree ornaments, and care for her mother's dying mind and body.
Ellen does not want to do this job, and yet she does a credible job of it, even to the point of turning a cooking error into a new recipe. For the first time in her life, she spends a great deal of time with her mother, and begins to understand and respect her. Her mother declines rapidly, and her extraordinary pain requires that she have a morphine catheter. There are a few scenes in this book that will have you in tears, but overall I have to say that when it comes to creating a family in trouble, Jane Smiley has it all over Anna Quindlen. Not that this is a bad book--it is certainly worth reading. When Ellen is accused of murdering her mother, the book takes another turn, and there is an interesting surprise ending. But if we can think of a family as a forest, Anna Quindlen's forest doesn't have very much ground cover. Her trees are nicely spaced, and the whole place looks a bit landscaped. Jane Smiley's families, however, are so rich and complex, so overgrown and messy, that if you dropped your sweater there, you'd never find it again!
At Paradise Gate is cinemagraphic in the extreme. Each scene is lovingly crafted with slow, detailed explorations of the character's psyche's through their actions and words. Almost all of your senses are involved--you can see the color of Ike's eyes, you can smell the bread baking, you can hear the babble of the three daughter's voices and the groan of the dog, you can feel the cold porcelain in the bathroom, you can taste the tea as it is brought to the table. There is nothing exciting in this book; it moves with the heavy pace of an old foreign film, examining each character, each hand movement, each sigh, each recollection, in exquisite detail.
I would tell you the story presented here, but as is usual with Jane Smiley, it doesn't really matter. It is the family process we read her for, to know our own family through the ones she presents in her novels. For Jane Smiley writes about archetypes. Somewhere in her pages are all the people you have ever known, or will ever know. We sit down at the table with Anna, and we refuse to hear Ike calling us because we are simply sick of it all, and too tired to get up. And we feel guilty and a little sick, and a little angry, too. And we know that we are making a mistake, and yet does it really matter in the end? For Jane Smiley's people are so human that we know them at some intimate level from the first page. And we remember them long after we close the book.
Both of these novels are good ones, but Jane Smiley's writing, in my humble opinion, is just too wonderful for words!
Copyright © 1996 Lee Lawton
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
Never Say Never practically reached out and grabbed me. I finished it, all hot and bothered, ready to laugh and ready to cry both at the same time, with a big lump somewhere deep down inside.
I immediately began rereading it, and kept rereading it over the next few days, until I stopped at the point where I felt that I could practically start spouting some of the passages verbatim.
At the same time I wondered why the book generated such a strong reaction in me. It wasn't that well written. Linda Hill even annoyed me at the beginning, with the newbie author habit of serving up capsule descriptions of each character, like the asides you might see at the beginning of a play script.
She writes in very simple language, as well. Short sentences. Some without verbs. This is fine by me, but it could annoy the sticklers.
Anyway, when I'd calmed down enough to start thinking instead of feeling about the book, I realized what happened. Hill had captured parts of my own coming out experience, the things I had done and thought and felt more than ten years ago.
Of course there are differences between these printed pages and my own story. Hill's "average looking" computer analyst Leslie Howard is an out dyke who's got an attraction to a straight colleague that she tries to resist from the first chapter. (Rule number one: never, ever, get involved with a straight woman.)
I'd been in denial about my lesbianism until I fell head over heels for a straight colleague, but I resisted nothing except a physical relationship. Even in my besotted state I knew I'd be rejected.
Never Say Never, though, is romantic fiction. So all good things come to our heroine. Right from the start we get hints this is a woman on a roll. In a heart-to-heart after she busted loose from a bad relationship, Leslie's best friend tells her to sample some nightlife while on a business trip.
"I can't just walk into some gay bar. You never know what they're going to be like. And I can't just go up and talk to a woman."
"Please. You talk to women every day. Besides, they'll be falling all over themselves to talk to YOU."
Her friend was joking, but prophetic. Women DO seem to fall into Leslie's lap, without her even half trying. She's curiously passive, in fact. Never does more than eye women with longing. But she doesn't have to. They chase after her.
Average woman gets cute bouncy (let's not forget understanding!) girljock. Average woman gets straight woman of her dreams.
Yeah, I know I'm giving away the plot. But the plot's not the point. The point is the romance, that delicious, wet romance. Hill managed to make me gasp with every smoldering glance, with every light touch.
It's all vanilla. This is a Naiad book, after all. But the Big Sex Scene is a fitting climax, without getting too clinical. Hill picks her detail carefully, for maximum oooooh value.
The romance is truly the star here. And to me, Hill brings it to life. I can still remember the butterflies I got in my stomach when my first woman lover called me 'Honey.' Hill hasn't forgotten the way that kind of thing can pull at your heartstrings.
She does tackle some of the serious coming out issues, like the impact of rejection from friends and family. But any sidetracks from Great Passion are brief.
Is it really like my coming out story? I don't know. I suppose not.
But there's that shopping scene. I, too, had shopping scenes with my straight object of longing. And the shared take-out Chinese food. And even laying in the same bed with the loved one, paralyzed with longing.
I guess there's enough there for me to make it my own, transformed with a happy ending. Hill certainly succeeded in drawing this reader right into her book.
Naiad says she's got a new novel coming out next year, called Class Reunion. I can't wait.
Copyright © 1996 Karen Sloan
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
I didn't like Allison O'Neill, the heroine of Lauren Wright Douglas' latest book, Death at Lavender Bay.
I don't even think she likes herself.
"You scare people," she tells her own image in the mirror. "That's why they've been looking at you like you're a Klingon."
Douglas is the successful and prolific author of the lesbian mysteries based around the tough private eye, Caitlin Reece. Reece isn't your lovable gal-next-door either, but she's certainly more sympathetic than the center of this story.
O'Neill, a second-hand book dealer of sorts, sets out to investigate the death of her aunt, who bequeaths her a bed and breakfast on the coast of Oregon, an inn that turns out to be -- SURPRISE -- populated by dykes. As a matter of fact, the whole region is full of them.
I guess this book falls into a category I've heard others describe as "even the cat is a lesbian." Well, there's nothing said here about the sexual orientation of the pet in this novel, but you get the idea.
O'Neill didn't, though. It took her ages to notice all of the lesbians around her. I guess that's one of the things that annoyed me, her self-absorbtion. It's not that she doesn't notice her surroundings, more that they don't have too much impact on her, or she can't process them properly, or SOMETHING.
About the only thing that did penetrate her haze was a whale-watching experience. If you can explain that one to me, please get in touch...
This is a woman who admits she never had friends, "not real friends. Only past, present and potential lovers." This is a woman who got a nice card from her aunt "every Christmas and every birthday, and what did I send her back? Nada."
She hired young Native American private eye Kerry Owyhee to help her figure out what was going on. O'Neill got a message to tell Owyhee she was kicked out of her home, and was in danger. But she forgot to pass it on for the longest time!
No wonder her aunt's lover screams "you stupid girl" at O'Neill toward the end of the book, when she finally tells her what had happened to her aunt.
I had figured it out about a third of the way through, and it was a long wait to get my suspicions confirmed.
Is there ANYTHING positive to say about this book? Well, Douglas is a veteran author, so the writing flows smoothly and the plot, such as it is, hangs together without any loose ends.
I like the setting in the Pacific Northwest. And I don't know too much about Native American culture, but Douglas' description of Owyhee's history and family is interesting, and rings true.
I'll also confess that I'll pick up the next book in the series. Douglas left a sub-plot hanging, and she's piqued my curiosity. I want to find out what happens to Owyhee...
Copyright © 1996 Karen Sloan
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
Paris in 1910, dark buildings and alleys, a blind pianist named Perdita, a neuroscientist burdened with guilt, a mysterious stalker, a forged painting, a murder, a great flood filling sewers, basements, tearing down buildings -- The Knowledge of Water has all the trappings of a gothic romance.
But is it a gothic? Unlike the thrillers it resembles, this book frequently reverses expectations, leaving both readers and characters to consider problems of identity, women's identity especially. What is forgery? What is artistic identity? Most important, we are required to consider women's identity as writers, painters, musicians.
In Sarah Smith's earlier novel, The Vanished Child, the neuroscientist discovers his identity: child murderer of his vicious, abusive, and immensely wealthy grandfather. Will I murder again? he asks himself in The Knowledge of Water, struggling with his need to find another identity by marrying and totally possessing Perdita.
The questions Perdita asks herself are ones talented women find familiar. Will I be able to submerge my desire for music? Is life outside myself and my love for music a forgery made up by society for women? Will I be a great pianist if the world says only men can have that label? Who will I be if I am my husband's possession? Will the world accept a married woman as a concert pianist?
Her answers are in part provided by two women, each of them a lost artist herself. Madame Mallais, widow of a great painter, had won a prize for a painting done before she married, but had submerged herself in her husband's work. The other woman, Milly, had in her early youth written novels published under her husband's name; now she earns her living by writing for the journals, mostly anonymously but sometimes using her former husband's name. Perdita comes to understand that we create what we see and we often do not see what we look at. She believes and acts upon the idea there are a few moments in a life when the truth comes flooding up and we must tell it, or live a lie.
In her "Afterword and Acknowledgements" placed like an epilogue to the book, Sarah Smith ironically calls her work "a forgery." She has used a "collage of newspaper stories" to describe the 1910 flood that does not so much cause the denouement as in the usual thriller, but symbolizes it. She also admits to imitating real people from this period, giving new names to Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Picasso, Colette, and granting each of them a voice in the dialogue about identity and forgery, women and the label "artist." One of these characters defines a forgery as something so good that you can manage to believe in it for a long time before its power fades. The power of Sarah Smith's "forgery" fades slowly and imperceptibly.
Copyright © 1996 Carol McPhee
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
The inexorable progress of madness is no more certain then death. And this story is about both madness and death. Saz Martin, the gutsy private investigator of Calendar Girl, returns in this hip and witty journey into the dark side of New Age gurus and the process of "healing." There's no giving away the secret of this mystery, as it is apparent almost from the initial scenes that there is something weird going on. We know the killer and we know his crimes, unveiled to us by no greater authority than himself as Saz tries to catch up with him before something else happens, something terrible. In a curious but prescient symmetry, we see what Saz finds out before she discovers it, know what may be around the corners she turns, and the book is more interesting because of it. Our knowledge is like the background music in a gothic movie thriller, the eerie score comes up under as the heroine enters the forbidden room and... WATCH OUT!!!
Well, OK, so the room was empty, but wait, is that the curtain moving? Was that a stealthy footstep in the hall outside? Isn't there a safer way to earn a living? What's a girl to do? Saz is a hunter and we feel her excitement as she closes in on her quarry, the thrill of danger quite obviously has her in thrall and we can live out our own fantasies of reckless derringdo while safely propped up in bed with the pillows behind us and all the doors and windows locked. Whew! I had to get up and make sure they were.
As we are led down the trail of murder forward, Saz traces it back and the meeting place, the nexus where all the madness comes together, is vibrant with taut and unexpected emotion and surprise. Saz has a girlfriend in this one, and she is involved as a source of suspense and dangerous vulnerability as well. All is not edge-of-the-seat thrills, though, Saz finds time for quite a lot of steamy sex along with the requisite wisecracks stemming from her cynical private investigator's standup view of life.
One perhaps unintended side effect of the alienated "outsider" viewpoint of Saz as private eye is a reluctance to "get involved" with "social issues." This reluctance allows Saz to stand aside and allow the future exploitation of therapeutic victims by a nasty villain she doesn't feel privileged to reveal. I think that went a bit too far. It troubled me more than a little and her rationalization that the powers that be wouldn't have allowed an investigation sounded a little thin. But maybe life looks different from a British perspective. Clandestine agencies in the USA have largely to lie and sneak to cover up their dirty little secrets and we have no real equivalent of the Official Secrets Act to keep ordinary citizens quiet. But given the British tabloid penchant for scandal, I would think that a word or two dropped in the right ears would put paid to many a dark conspiracy.
Against this little descent into cynical anarchy, which is shared to some degree by many of her fellow shamuses, is the overall quality of her writing and our ready involvement with her. She's really quite good.
Just to give you a taste, here are a few phrases from the book where Ms. Duffy has Saz making the bed and "musing on the tedious predictability of falling in love" and then later going back to bed "until one o'clock when she could enjoy the afternoon news in the glad knowledge that the horrifyingly addictive morning television she so despised wouldn't catch her unawares and force her into a wasted morning of minor soap stars and new breast-feeding techniques." Unh-huh! Have we been there or not? Stella Duffy is a writer to watch, and if you're tired of the same old stuff from some of the lesser lights of lesbian detective fiction, you might want to make the effort to find her. She's well worth the search and I can hardly wait to see her next volume in the series.
Copyright © 1997 Lee Anne Phillips
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
This is a book of crone wisdom, but not the crone we imagine we might be. Isabell Miller has created an incantatory masterpiece calling up the spirit of age, of the struggle between romantic illusion and crabby wretchedness.
Wisdom is a long time coming, maybe never, and Lucille, the protagonist and peri-menopausal internal narrator of this marvelous little gem is grimly hanging on to adolescence, alcohol, passion, independence, anger, loneliness, and all the rest of the impediments to enlightenment that bind us to the wheel of life when a very young Laura steps nonchalantly through her window and announces that she has had a dream.
Unlike the lofty dream of a certain social reformer, hers was quite personal and specific and involved playing with Lucille's nipples, only to be disappointed when she woke and found that they were only the buttons of her bedspread.
The impact of this statement is strangely altered by the fact that she strolled in with her boyfriend, who is completely undismayed by the news. O tempore, o mores! The generation gap is made visible as a yawning gulf that they both try tentatively to bridge. Lucille is not a perfect woman, she drinks... too much; she is churlish and fragile and loving by turns, just like real women one might know.
Like real women, Lucille often doesn't know what she wants, or how to get it even if she does. She fights against her own interior obstacles and weaknesses as much, or even more, as she does the external circumstances that beset her. If she doesn't really understand the mind of her newfound girlfriend, she has no better understanding of herself. All she has is the willingness to describe what goes on inside her head as the world unfolds around her.
She turns an honest eye on herself and we are privy to, privileged to hear, her secret thoughts; the regrets, the passion, the foolish hopes and bitter disappointments are all ours to know but not with any sense of eavesdropping, just the inner dialogue one might have, be having, with oneself.
That's enough, that honesty. We grow to like her as we struggle to understand. And we can cheer her victories as if they were our own. In a way, perhaps they are.
Isabell Miller is the author of Patience and Sarah, another masterpiece, Side by Side, The Love of Good Women, and A Dooryard Full of Flowers. Sadly, this latest work is her last as she died this year, October 3rd, 1996.
Copyright © 1997 Lee Anne Phillips
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
What do Barbie and O.J. Simpson have in common? This is not a book of riddles but a serious look at race and racism, gender and sexism, ethnicity and discrimination in modern America. Ann DuCille is Professor of American and African American Literature at The University of California at San Diego, and doesn't spare the marble halls of academe in her insightful and biting analysis of the way race, gender, and ethnicity are encoded and woven into the fabric of our lives.
It could hardly be more topical, when the voices of "angry white men" and their proxies are loudly raised, demanding "equal rights" for white guys, when a law prohibiting affirmative or remedial action passed handily in California and is soon to be on the ballots in other states, and when the white male establishment in general seems to have taken the phrase, "there's no defense like a good offense" to heart. The forces of reaction are now denying that neither racism nor sexism "really" exists anymore, and even if it did it wouldn't be fair to do anything about it if that meant unprivileging the people who have benefitted most from the former status quo.
Well, the status quo is candidly and wittily exposed in Ms. DuCille's series of essays, and the picture it paints is neither pretty nor unexpected for anyone with eyes to see what goes on under their noses. And under one's nose is where, by and large, she finds her examples. This is not a dry recitation of statistics or recondite analysis of obscure incunabula but a passionate examination of the countless ordinary objects and invidiously banal actions which sum up our society of "difference."
What young woman of the USA has not played with Barbie dolls? And how many of us have later thought about what the impossibly wasp-waisted, long-legged, fabulously clothed and coifed Barbie has to say about what it means to be a woman?
How Barbie has been coded for a stereotyped gender, race, and ethnicity is perhaps old news to some but I was surprised to find how thoroughly and consistently Mattel has misled the girls and women who clamour for them. They deny the precocious eroticism implicit in Barbie's revealing lingerie, fabulous wardrobe, and voluptuous figure while simultaneously pandering to it in both actions and advertisements. Not only is Barbie a "knockoff" of "Bild Lilli," a German sex fantasy toy for men, but the concessions to "race" and ethnicity have been, literally, skin deep.
To counter the criticism of African American women who demanded a body shape more like real black women, Mattel claimed to produce a doll with wider hips and protruding buttocks. In fact, Ms. DuCille notes that they merely distorted the doll's posture to give that illusion. Their attempt at "inclusiveness," at redefining their "we" to include African Americans is deftly revealed to be a sham.
The problem of who "we" are is examined in most of the essays which follow, looking at black men trying to claim "solidarity" with black women and demanding that women shut up and close ranks with "their" men, white academics colonizing black and women's studies and co-opting issues long the province of the groups most affected by expanding "we" to the point that it becomes a meaningless display of oneupmanship. Her analysis of the politics of identity reveals "we" to be an illusion in many contexts, however self-gratifying, and vulnerable to terrible misunderstandings and insulting slights.
Yet this very point troubles me. She demonstrates the problems very well but her solutions are harder to grasp, except perhaps in hopeful imagination. Is any "we" all that sturdy? We are all fragile. Our flimsy pretensions and gossamer delusions are far too easy to tear asunder with the sharp teeth of reality.
Who hasn't felt the bitter pangs of betrayal or slight when we discover that "we," our best friends, our gendermates, our loved ones, are not so cohesive as we fondly believed? Who hasn't felt patronized and insulted when some silly male twit confidently tells one he knows *exactly* how it feels to be raped, for example, because his car was broken into just the other day? For every attempt we make to come together in any context there are powerful forces which simultaneously strive to tear us apart, not the least of which is our own proud and stubborn folly.
It is perhaps too facile to dissect the tentative attempts to form a "we" that she so eloquently dismembers. For in deconstructing these well-meaning but ignorant efforts to bridge a gulf, isn't she also evoking an existential separation, a fundamental failure of our ability to understand by analogy rather than experience, which forever dooms such efforts?
I don't know. And this is perhaps the most troubling thing I took from the book, the underlying uncertainty, even despair, it makes me feel. In spite of her belated call to understanding and the vision of something better that hovers behind her words, is existential despair the appropriate attitude toward life? But then why bother writing a book? I agree with her in so many ways. Like her, I am angry. I see the possibility of coming conflagration and societal collapse as clearly as does she, but is there no hope for us? Will the Pete Wilsons and Newt Gingriches of the world manage to consume us all in the fires of their slickly-packaged and self-serving bigotry?
Or will we somehow scrape by, stumbling from crisis to crisis, teetering on the brink of apocalypse but managing somehow to avoid falling in? Are those of us naive enough to imagine that differences can be overcome, or ignored, or accepted, in an ever more inclusive "we" persuasive enough, or lucky enough, or persistent enough to bring about some patchwork reconciliation before we explode into atoms?
Some believe that humans are unable to embrace any larger group than the tribe, the few hundred people we interact with on a daily basis, and the rest of the world can "go hang" in a deep sense, in that we cannot really care for them, even if we don't actively hate or despise them.
I believe that Ms. DuCille feels otherwise; her lessons are easily understood and her examples so "down home" that it would be difficult to misunderstand. Although she presents the grim facts of gender and ethnic oppression without much to relieve a troubling picture, and condemns, perhaps too easily, many of the somewhat smug or condescending attempts at rapproachment made by some progressive or liberal thinkers, there is reconciliation implicit in her words.
It is a peace, however, which would only seem possible with a revolutionary change in the ever-increasing economic disparity between the rich and the poor, however, between the gender, ethnic, and cultural "minorities" who don't have equal shares of our common pie and the lucky few who own both pie and dish. For the most part, the "lucky" ones are white and male. The majority are of the upper classes, which means that they inherited their wealth and did not earn it, as our collective myth would prefer it.
This is a desperate thought, and is the collision point of despair at which we will all meet, sooner or later.
Copyright © 1997 Lee Anne Phillips
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
When I read this large-format book I was struck by two things, the fact that this book of traveler's tales included one of the most extensive and thorough bibliographies and indices I've ever seen in a travel diary, and how wonderfully it reminded me that the word "amateur" is related to "love." She has a loving eye for detail, and so obviously loves the people and places she portrays that it was a pleasure to read her simultaneous analysis of causes and effects in the geopolitical world.
At one point, she talks about geography, that neglected orphan child of "modern" education, and makes us realize that it *is* important, much more than the dry plotting of shifting national borders on the unchanging face of the "real world" but the very lineaments of our own face, the face of humanity migrating and jostling its way around the world, trying to get by and fit in wherever we go.
Unlike many compendiums of travel "curios," when she describes an alien culture she also notices how alien she appears in their context, so that to some degree we have the benefit of two viewpoints, herself looking at the world, and the world looking back at her, throughout the book.
So when she goes to Greece, the physical country is just a stopping off place for the country of the mind, how Greece came to be the country it is today, how it happens that the center of the world, the greatest flower of Western civilization, withers under the rule of a long succession of foreign conquerors and despots, it is that change is constant and the current hegemony of the United States of America is quite probably fleeting as well.
She ponders the decline in the share of world production contributed by the USA, from fully half in the 1950's to less than a quarter today, sliding rapidly toward a fifth, or even less. She speculates that the USA may be too big to experience the ruination every other empire has fallen prey to, but this seems like whistling in the dark, and she means it more as an exhortation than a firm belief.
This is a fascinating book, and well worth picking up for random browsing, perhaps on your next vacation, or before. If it doesn't give you pause to think, even for a moment, then at least it will furnish a store of party conversation tidbits to last at least through the next millenium.
Copyright © 1997 Lee Anne Phillips
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
This is a compendium of homely virtues, of perfectly ordinary lives and troubles, the yearning of a US expatriate in Canada, the secret burden of guilt a confessor shares, the dreams of a woman everyone ignores. These are the stories of people who say of themselves, "I'm only...."
Only a son coping with his mother's death and his continuing life, only a teenaged girl agreeing to meet a step-father after many years, only a man in a strip joint looking at a woman who reminds him of his daughter, only a little step out of our own lives and into another's. But what giant steps these are.
Her ability to evoke these moments of reflection or turmoil is quite perfect, each short story is one which illuminates her characters and their obscure lives at just the right angle to throw it into sharp relief, distinguished from the mere commonplace by the poignant simplicity of human longing, and restlessness, and grief. A quotation from one of her stories might have been written as her own dust jacket copy:
Headlights are coming down the street, high beams parting the sheen of light rain, waking bushes and poles to instant, passing life.
from Trick or Treat, Season of Apples
Bright lights indeed, and focused on the people we know, or could know, ourselves, or the people next door. Put on your comfy robe and slippers for this lovely book, and plan on spending the evening. This one is not a coffee table book but rather one for the bedside table or armchair by the fire. Read it, you'll like it.
Copyright © 1997 Lee Anne Phillips
All Rights Reserved Worldwide
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